Timeplots posted an infographic on women’s participation in congress, which, all things being equal, has essentially remained flat. However, I take issue with the assumption that participation alone is a measure of somehting valuable, other than than as a vidication of the spread of the religion of secular humanism.
Also:
The Guardian posted an infographic on military spending, which implies that spending is some sort of jingoistic preference, rather than necessity.
Together, these graphics illustrate something other than stated. THey represent a measure of the non-rational ambitions of secular humanism rather than the material expression of economic risk and necessity.
The first is a misleading graphic, because it assumes that women would achieve some unstated GOOD by greater participation in political participation, rather than are a reflection of political sentiment.
For example, another Infographic that’s misleading is the comparison of the US military’s expenditures, which is far larger than any other nation’s. But this ignores the underlying reason for having a military: protecting trade routes. After first, property rights, and second, corruption the third factor most important in prosperity is trade routes. And the civilization that polices trade routes is, in human history, the prosperous one.
Another problem is that Chinese military’s size is overstated versus the US. The US uses vast numbers of contractors, as many or more of them than military personnel. The Chinese do not, but instead they perform these tasks within the military ranks.
Another problem is that our military is one of technology not numbers, so cost per soldier is more important.
Lastly, a very large portion of the military budget is for benefits and in particular, military benefits.
The meaningful, and therefore accurate measure of comparison of military cost is the total dollars minus benefits, adjusted by national purchasing power, expressed as a percentage of GDP spent on the military, divided by the number of miles of air, water, rail and road transit that the nation operates.
This would show that the USA is very close to dead last in military expenditure. Or rather, that the cost to its citizens is infinitesimal compared to that of other nations.
The same analysis would be informative for viewing other nations. Russia for example has a horrific country to transport goods upon and police. It is vast, much of it is harsh to human life, it has a terrorist threat on it’s border, China at it’s south and east, very little in the way of connected waterways and little access to worthwhile seas. All miltary costs for russia will be higher. It must be a threat in order not to become a victim.
(See Stratfor’s articles on Rivers and seas as well as on China’s security needs)
The US is, fortunately, or unfortunately, the policeman of the seas, and took on that duty after the fall of the british empire. Our wealth is largely dependent, not upon democracy and all the other self-congratulating features we attribute to ourselves, but almost entirely to our control of the seas, because water transport is so much less expensive than any other. This military dominance makes our political values (secular humanism) and our currency, and our laws, the dominant structure on the planet, and is the reason why americans are prosperous. Early US growth was simply the result of applying european technology for the purposes of selling off and occupying a continent.
The assumption made by advocates of decreased military expenditure is that there would be little material impact, or that we would not be impacted. Or that this impact would lead to greater equality at home. But that would nto be true. It would lead to vastly higher costs and a permanent upper class, and a vast reduction of the middle class to lower standards of living. Any argument to the contrary must rely upon an example of decreasing control over shipping that led to something other than widespread decline across a nation. In other words, advocacy of pacifism is an appeal to Ludditeism.
The problem with women in politics in the US is related to the underlying political necessity of trade route protection. Since many people in the USA, rightly understand these necessary militaristic sentiments (Pareto would call them residues and derivations, and others would call them metaphysical preferences, others would call them biases, or jingoism) they are accurate representation of the problem at hand. Since our political structure is largely organized to maintain that policing and that trade, the population is more interested in maintaining a similar political sentiment. This tendency is generational, class based, and culturally influenced, and is becoming the minority sentiment (which is how civilizations age). But it is still the dominant sentiment among males. Even hispanic males.
The reason other nations have higher percentages of women en-toto, is that trade route protection is not the problem faced by, or sentiment held by, people in weaker states. Redistribution is.
The correct analysis of women in politicswould be visible if countries were ordered by their ability to expand trade routes. As such, you would see weak countries dominated by women, correctly expressing the social sentiment, and strong countries dominated by men.
This is, another example, of the philosophy of Power and Weakness stated by Kagan. People develop philosophies that they CAN. Women have a preference for maternal redistributive duties, and men have a preference for conflict resolution and status enhancement.
These charts, by contrast, are an example of a metaphysical bias toward the religious doctrine of secular humanism. (Which is the evolutionary result of christianity.) A pacifist doctrine that is only possible to maintain in the midst of prosperity – a prosperity generated by trade routes, and maintained by militaristic, expansionist, sentiments in a population. Both sentiments are necessary. But dominance of one sentiment is a function of the nation’s needs.
So, in other words, if we look at the miles of transport that we police, we have a very, very cheap military. And women serve according to their preference, and societies preference for their sentiments.
Women CAN serve in politics. Ability is not a question. Sentiment is a question. Because, in the presence of inadequate information to allow us to predict the future, we make decisions according to our sentiments. And politicians are of necessity both inadequately informed, and not in their positions because they are informed, but because they appeal to voter sentiments.
So these charts do not illustrate what the authors mean them to: an illustration of the progress yet to be made in advancing the religion of secular humanism. They illustrate something else entirely: the resistance by the objective and material world of raeality to the religion of secular humanism, and the rationality of those existing judgements in the face of the irrationality of the ambitions of secular humanism.
Men and women have different sentiments, and it is almost entirely biological in nature. And there is no evidence to the contrary. Yet our political discourse must, for secular humanist reasons of faith, deny that fact.
Arguably from a man’s perspective, especially a divorced man, we have rendered unto women extraordinary privileges never available to men in human history. To the detriment of men’s quality of life, men’s occupational distribution (men take the high risk jobs and largely bear the brunt of unemployment), and medically, more money is diverted to research for women’s health than for mens. Certanly benefit systems are set up to give women an advantage. Especially when we consider that the world’s primary issue is overpopulation, not pollution, or health care. Overpopulation.
We have implemented this shift from male dominated benefit, to women dominated benefit, by women’s participation in the voting structure, not by women’s participation in politics – a participation level which appears to have leveled out.
The same is true for women’s participation in the work force. It has leveled out. The same appears to be occurring in the past two generations. Women under 30 are not as activist as they were in the post-war generations. The post war generations were largely an effort to demilitarize society that has been militarized in order to fight the world wars, and recently, because of labor saving devices (invented by men) that no longer made it necessary for women to spend the day in home labor.
In other words, we attribute to our politics those causes which were actually effects. This overemphasis of politics is another example of the religion of secular humanism, which attributes to collective judgment that which is an artifact of economic conditions. And economic conditions which are an artifact of military sentiments.
In the 19th and early 20th century, our trade routes were largely internal, as the Great Lakes region industrialized so that the west could be populated. In the 1980’s our trade routes moved from the atlantic to the pacific, along with the technology leadership, and increasingly are doing so. The same is true for financing. San Francisco is the primary source of investment capital for experimental ideas.
At some future point, our trade routes will change again. When that happens, we will change our political participation to be more masculine, or more feminine, depending upon our nation’s position of power and weakness.
Just as every other nation will.
